


The Last Day of Camp

by w_k_smith



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Not really Reylo, Summer Camp, don't be mean, i haven't seen rise of skywalker, they are just kids, this is just supposed to be cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:00:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23046652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/w_k_smith/pseuds/w_k_smith
Summary: Camp is over, but Rey and Ben aren't ready to go home.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Kudos: 1





	The Last Day of Camp

The bus drove away from camp missing two of its junior high passengers, both of whom watched it go from their perch on top of the activities hall. Sneaking away had been easy for Rey. She was the only poor foster kid at camp on scholarship that summer, and even most of the adults avoided the quiet, intense girl who didn’t know anyone and didn't make friends easily. Ben had had a harder time, especially with his Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara working at the camp, but he’d had years of practice slipping away from his mother and his father and nannies and bodyguards. Nobody had sounded the alarm when neither of them got on the bus, but there was still time for someone to notice they were missing.

The bus became a blur moving through the trees. It swung wide turning onto the main road, and was out of sight.

Rey turned to Ben, and smiled. “Let’s go.”

They slid down the roof and onto the twisted old tree they’d used to climb on top of the activities hall. Rey’s backpack snagged on the branches, but Ben untangled the straps. Rey bent her knees when she jumped down so she wouldn’t hurt herself, and the second her sneakers hit the dirt, her heart began to pound with nervous excitement. Even if the bright blue sky above was ringed by dark grey clouds.

Camp was so quiet now. From the first second Rey had arrived three weeks ago, even the gravel pathways that wound through the woods between the cabins and the main buildings had been full of noise. Other kids laughing, other kids shouting at each other, other kids racing and playing Frisbee and howling that the _last one in the lake pisses the bed!_ Rey felt like she was looking at an object that was physically missing a piece. A car with three wheels. A clock with just an hour hand.

Ben caught her staring.

“We don’t have to go, you know,” he said slowly. “We can wait for them to come back for us. We can pretend we got left behind by mistake.”

“I want to go,” Rey said.

“Then we should _go_ ,” Ben said pointing toward the lake. “Someone will be back soon. Someone always is.”

Ben had run away, he said, “plenty of times” before. Sometimes, Rey was jealous he had always had people to run away from. But now they were leaving _together_.

They ignored the paths and ran through the trees to the steep, sloping beach leading down to the lake. Ben almost tripped, but Rey grabbed his arm before he fell headfirst into the sand. They dragged a canoe into the water. The clear waves splashing onto the beach soaked Rey’s sneakers, as she took a running jump into the front of the canoe. The boat bobbed and pitched, and it all started up again when Ben jumped in the back. They immediately drifted at an angle, but they grabbed their oars and plunged them into water.

The grey clouds were creeping closer, but there was enough sun reflecting off the water to make Rey squint at the view ahead. A buoy waggled in the water not too far offshore – all the campers had been told they _not_ to paddle past it. But Rey and Ben’s goal was the dark line way, way beyond the buoy: the shore of the opposite side of the lake.

“How far away do you think it is?” Rey asked.

“A hundred miles,” Ben said.

“I think it’s a _thousand_ miles,” Rey said.

“I think it’s a whole parsec.”

Rey snorted. “That’s unrealistic.”

Water slapped over the front of the boat and hit her square in the face. She laughed. She hadn’t ever spent much time around water before coming to camp. She’d always thought of it as a rich-person thing. She’d spent most of her first week at camp struggling in the water, forcing her head under the surface until she wasn’t afraid of it anymore. She wasn’t going to win backstroke medals anytime soon, but she wasn’t scared of the dark blue water stretching all around the canoe.

“What do you think is over there?” Ben asked.

“Monsters,” Rey said, as seriously as she could.

“I mean it. Do you think there are people over there?”

“No…” Rey said slowly. She squinted at the opposite shore again. It was closer now. The individual trees were visible, and so was the long, empty beach. “I don’t see any houses. Besides, if we run into someone, we’ll go somewhere else.”

“We’ll stay on the water,” Ben said, and Rey heard the smile come back in his voice. “We’ll find lake monsters.”

“We’ll become pirates,” she said.

“My dad used to be a pirate.”

“No _way_.”

“He was a smuggler, and that’s kind of like a pirate.”

“You said he was a politician.”

“No, he _became_ a politician. After the war. He got boring, but he wasn’t always.”

“You can tell yourself he was _always_ boring,” Rey said, because he sounded so, what was the word, morose. “That way you don’t feel bad for missing out.”

“No,” Ben said, resignedly. “There’s no such thing as a boring smuggler. Do you…do you ever think about your parents?” he asked, after a second.

Rey shoved her oar into the water and pushed back so hard the canoe was knocked off course. Ben corrected it without saying anything.

“All the time,” Rey said.

“What do you think?”

“I think they suck.”

“I thought you didn’t know them.”

“ _Exactly_.”

The bottom of the canoe ground against the sandy bottom of the shallow water. Rey and Ben jumped out and dragged the canoe all the way onto the shore. Water soaked Rey’s sneakers and socks, and the damp felt colder now. The wind blew across the water, and there was a light chill to it, like someone had opened a fridge nearby.

The shore was dotted with rocks, some big, some pebbles, every color of grey. Rey picked up a flat-ish rock and tried to skip it across the water. It bounced once, and sank, like it was feeling unenthusiastic that day. Ben grabbed a bigger rock and threw it far over the water, winding up and lunging forward like he was throwing as hard as he could.

It started to rain. The rain didn’t start with a drizzle, but instead the sky split and water poured down. Rey and Ben ran for the woods, ducking under the tangled branches. They pushed aside a giant purple-green bush, which was already heavy with rainwater.

“Over there!” Ben said, pointing ahead at a cluster of trees. The branches had grown over each other, looped together with the winding vines of some kind of parasite. They wedged themselves under the branches, squatting down in the dirt. There was just enough room for both of them, but Rey would up wrinkling her nose.

“You smell bad,” she told Ben, raising her voice over the sound of the rain.

“You smell worse,” he said.

“How long until someone finds us?” Rey asked.

He shrugged. “You can never stay away forever,” Ben said, digging his heels into the mud. “Someone always comes to get you eventually.”

“Is that bad or good?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But it feels good, sometimes. To try.”

Rey knew what he meant. She wasn’t stupid. Neither was Ben. They knew they couldn’t really stay out here forever.

But sometimes you just had to take something for yourself. Even when no one was expecting it. Even when you weren’t supposed to. And you sat and waited, knowing the consequences were coming. But you had to believe that it would be worth it in the end. Because it already felt like it had been.

And as the rain beat down, she quietly wished that it would stay that way.


End file.
